The invention discloses a preparation method of an amino-acid ester or deuterated amino-acid ester compound, which comprises the following steps of: adding a
photosensitizer and an
organic solvent into a reaction container by taking imidic ester,
silane and water or
heavy water as initial raw materials, carrying out stirring reaction under the
irradiation of
blue light, detecting that the reaction
raw material imidic ester completely disappears by TLC thin-layer
chromatography, and filtering to obtain the deuterated amino-acid ester compound. And stopping stirring, removing the volatile
solvent, carrying out
silica gel column chromatography or neutral
alumina column chromatography, and carrying out vacuum concentration to obtain the target amino-acid ester or deuterated amino-acid ester compound. According to the method,
blue light catalysis is used for replacing traditional
precious metal catalysis,
silane and water are used for replacing a traditional
hydrogen source for the first time,
transfer hydrogenation of the imidic ester compounds is achieved, cheap
deuterium water is used as a
deuterium source, a series of deuterated amino-acid ester compounds can be prepared, and therefore the production cost is greatly reduced; the method provided by the invention has the advantages of mild catalytic conditions, simple catalytic
system, high reaction selectivity, high safety and high synthesis efficiency, and is worthy of popularization and application.